Our Expierence of WWW

I’m going to completely admit that before this class I knew absolutely nothing about the WWW and Internet infrastructure. And honestly, it still confuses me. Who knew that the web and the Internet were different things? I thought they were simply interchangeable words, synonyms that could be looked up on Microsoft word. But they are different and when to my surprise when I click on Internet, there are no synonyms for it. It is it’s own thing. Which brings us to what John Udell was saying in class. When it comes to the World Wide Web, our imagination is our only limit. We decide what we want to make. Who we want to share it with and what we want it to mean. Take words for example. Dackolupatoni: when you Google that, nothing comes up. But here is our experiment. Let’s search it in a few hours and probably this will come up. Which is recursion. And then that person can be linked to this. And it goes on and on. Now isn’t that cool?

In the book Berners-Lee states that “If you haven’t yet experienced the web, the best way to find out about it is to try it” Now isn’t that true (and also for pretty much everything). But it would nearly impossible to understand the web if you have never used it, never experienced the networks and seen its power. Which is why I think that there is still a problem as John said with realizing the difference between things in the physical world versus things in the virtual world. Maybe it is a generation thing. Maybe when the Clickerati are one of the other generations alive and everyone below them was born into a world fully immersed in the WWW, this distinction won’t be a problem. Like Julie said it is impossible to try to explain to our grandparents, sometimes-even parents, the purpose behind what we are doing on the web. Why we would possibly fb chat a friend instead of calling them. But I feel like once you truly discover the web, you can’t turn your back on it. So it will be interesting to see what happens when every generation has a knowledge of the web to some degree. Although there will probably be something new by then…

Another piece of our discussion that really caught my attention was the idea of ownership on the web. When you purchase a domain name you are essentially renting a url. I think that is interesting considering how every tweet has it’s own url. Why do we have to “rent” a url in some cases, but when it comes to twitter every single time we tweet, we create a new url. It comes down to advertsing. If the site uses advertising, you don’t need to buy it. But why would a site use advertising so that we get a free product? Because we are the product. What would facebook or twitter be without its users? Nothing. It needs us. We are facebook and twitter.

So maybe this reading wasn’t the most exciting for me, but without fail #vtclis12 developed an intriguing discussion from it that broaden my horizons and made me think.

4 responses to “Our Expierence of WWW”

Hey now, it took longer than it should have but this page is finally indexed and rising on Google’s home page. (Not yet Bing but should show up there too.) The problem was that we’ve been using https: links but the server doesn’t have a proper certificate (geeky explanation behind that, doesn’t matter for our purposes here), which seems to have upset the search engine crawlers. So I revised my blog entry to use http: links to here instead. Wish I’d thought of that on Friday, you’d have seen the effect right away instead of waiting for today.)

(I think the class should do the same — i.e. http: not https: — when referring to its own stuff here at blogs.lt.vt.edu.)

Meanwhile I’ve been humming dackolupatoni to myself. Haven’t come up with a song yet but it feels like it has “Giacomo fina ney” potential.

“Joc-a-mo-fee-no-ah-nah-nay, Joc-a-mo-fee-nah-nay” is a ritual chant used by the Mardi Gras Indians which has been around for so long the words are no longer clearly distinguishable, and it has a well understood meaning of its own. Very, very loosely translated it signifies “we mean business” or “don’t mess with us”.

Sorry I have been out of it this week, but look at that.. when I google dackolupatoni now there are all sorts of results! Thanks 🙂 Now I’m going to have that stuck in my head all day (and I think I like it). I’ll have to try the experiment again with the correct http: . I appreciate the feedback, very cool!